Targeted Versus Conventional Economic Sanctions: What Is at Stake for Human Rights?

ABSTRACT

The adverse impact of economic sanctions on human rights is well documented in the literature (Peksen 2009; Wood 2008) and so are the consequences of sanctions for democracy (Peksen and Drury 2009, 2010) and for the survival of leaders (Escribà-Folch & Wright 2010; Marinov 2005). Using data from the Targeted Sanctions Consortium (Biersteker, Eckert, Tourinho, and Hudákóva 2013), we analyze whether sanctions that target segmented groups within the leadership fare any better with respect to human rights protection. The analysis focuses on the universe of targeted sanctions against African countries, between 1992 and 2008, and finds that the adverse impact of this coercive instrument—though unintended—is not statistically distinguishable from the adverse consequences already identified by the literature with respect to conventional sanctions. All else equal, the protection of rights to physical integrity (the right to life and the prohibition of torture) in the targeted country is 1.74 times more likely to worsen under an episode of targeted sanction when compared to a situation where there is no sanction. We propose a signaling model wherein a targeted leader is perceived by the opposition as weakened by the sanctions, which leads to more protest and repression. Higher levels of human rights violations follow.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic sanctions
• human rights
• targeted sanctions

Acknowledgments

We thank three anonymous reviewers of International Interactions for very helpful suggestions. We would also like to thank Steven Brams, Peter Rosendorff, and Rodolpho Bernabel for useful comments, as well as comments received when we presented the paper at the Center for the Study of International Negotiations Research Seminar, University of São Paulo. Errors remain our own.

Notes

¹ ReedSmith. 2014. Special Update: Sanctions. Several authors. Available at http://www.reedsmith.com/files/Publication/9221cf81-e4f7-4907-ab2c-f7dc249eac58/Presentation/PublicationAttachment/441e0ec9-dbd8-4c3a-b1fa-0bf7ed4d5872/alert_14-255.pdf?utm_source=Mondaq&utm_medium=syndication&utm_campaign=View-Original

² The Targeted Sanctions Consortium is a collaboration between the Graduate Institute, in Geneva, and the Watson Institute, at Brown University. For more information, visit their Web sites at http://graduateinstitute.ch/internationalgovernance/UN_Targeted_Sanctions.html and http://www.watsoninstitute.org/project_detail.cfm?id=4.

³ The authors mention the increase in human rights violations as a potential negative unintended consequence (Biersteker et al. 2013:38).

⁴ The question of the adverse impact of targeted sanctions is mentioned in Biersteker et al. (2013:17), where the authors discuss the increase in corruption and criminality as the most frequent unintended consequence associated with this foreign policy instrument; a negative consequence for the legitimacy of the Security Council, together with humanitarian consequences, are found in 39% of the cases.

⁵ The Biersteker et al. 2013 data set documents UN-sponsored targeted sanctions. There have been instances where targeted sanctions were imposed unilaterally or by regional organizations. There are no systematic data available on these sanctions. In the empirical analysis, we identify overlap between targeted and conventional sanctions; it would be interesting to see whether overlap between UN and bilateral and/or regional targeted sanctions, when and if it occurs, impacts our results. Presently, this is a limitation of our analysis.

⁶ Research on the political incentives behind authoritarian leaders’ decision to ratify the 1984 Convention Against Torture have embraced a similar methodological strategy (Rosendorff and Hollyer 2011; Vreeland 2008).

⁷ The authors analyze eight sanction episodes, between 2000 and 2009, wherein individuals had their assets frozen, were the subject of a travel ban, etc., and criticize an emphasis, so far, on the human rights of the individuals targeted by the sanctions (Wallensteen and Grusell 2012:208–212).

⁸ For an analysis of costs at the international level see Martin (1993).

⁹ This aspect of the imposition of targeted sanctions—equally relevant for conventional sanctions as well—will be explored in the future, through a broader analysis of the incentives faced by senders and targets during a sanction episode.

¹⁰ For instance, Biersteker, Eckert, Tourinho and Hudákóva find that the legitimacy and authority of the United Nations Security Council was impaired in 39% of the episodes of targeted sanctions that they analyze (2013:17).

¹¹ For more on the relationship between members of the winning coalition and the leadership, especially on how this relationship differs with respect to the size of the winning coalition—measured as a percentage of those eligible to participate in the political process (selectorate), who are essential to the political survival of the leadership—see Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, and Morrow (2003).

¹² The subsection of the game analyzed in Figure 2 foresees another possibility: The targeted leader resisted the increased demands made by the challenger, but the challenger did not protest. In this case, the targeted leadership realizes its best payoff of 4 and the challenger its worst payoff of 0. We carry this result to the game in the normal form and argue that the challenger is indifferent as to whether the targeted leader represses or not—thus in either case, the challenger gets 0. This is an artificial imposition from our part, with implications for the equilibrium that we find. We are satisfied that other model specifications would not compromise the outcome. For example, the leadership could receive some utility (1) when the resisted demands are not followed by protest by the challenger.

¹³ Drury, James, and Peksen discuss some of the limitations of this data (2014:32–33).

¹⁴ The measure comes from The CIRI Human Rights Data Project, available at http://www.humanrightsdata.com. Version 2014.04.14. Their aggregated measure, the physical integrity index, constructed from the Torture, Extrajudicial Killing, Political Imprisonment, and Disappearance indicators, ranges from zero (no government respect for these four rights) to 8 (full government respect for these four rights).

¹⁵ The UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset is a joint project between the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, and the Centre for the Study of Civil War at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO), available for download from www.prio.no/CSCW/Datasets/Armed-Conflict/UCDP-PRIO/ and www.pcr.uu.se/research/UCDP/our_data1.htm.

¹⁶ The Polity IV Project (Political Regimes Characteristics and Transitions, 1800–2013) Dataset Users’ Manual can be found at http://www.systemicpeace.org/inscr/p4manualv2013.pdf.

¹⁷ We were surprised by the nonsignificance of the tests for torture. We attribute this odd outcome to the unfortunate prevalence of torture in the region, which most likely obfuscates the impact of targeted sanctions per se.

¹⁸ All statistical analyses are performed in Stata 12.